Testimonial
When I feel truly hurt, I tend to suppress this feeling and push it down and start feeling weak, too weak to cook the foods I like, too weak to exercise, too weak to do everyday tasks, and too weak to work at school or be social.
It feels like I am giving up on myself and my physical well-being becomes unimportant. I eat fast foods and ready-to-go meals because it’s just easier which makes my stomach ache. I lie on the couch scrolling through endless of reels and posts, disregarding how my body feels and eventually ending up with a headache, and feeling miserable.
I shut down and get a strong sense of being trapped in my body, even if my favorite person calls me, I feel reluctant answering, scared that I will overwhelm them with my drama, scared they’ll see that I am not perfect, and everything is not always okay.
Scared I’ll become too much of a burden and people will not want me anymore, and eventually leave me.
I freeze myself out from the world around me, and I am left feeling scared, bitter and lonely. Even Hopeless. Like I am invisible, and no one would care or even notice if I just disappeared into thin air.
The fear can often turn into rage. And sometimes I’ll bite myself to stop the rage from exploding. A few years back biting and other forms of self-harm was a big part of my day. Over the years I have shared with others and worked with my anxiety and depression and the trauma hiding behind it. I rarely bite anymore, but in very rare occasions it can still happen, but it makes me feel sad and doesn’t feel right or give me any relief. What I truly want in the moment when I get overwhelmed with thoughts attacking me, is a gentle and warm hug.
Nowadays I actually hug myself. I stroke my arm and tell myself “It’s okay baby, I got you. You are safe.”
I struggled with severe anxiety and depression for many years, all symptoms of a complex PTSD disorder. I used to think my body was a prison, unable to move, in a constant “fight or flight” mode, and not able to keep up in a conversation or truly express how I felt.
I felt trapped. Like a slave chained up by the fear of my very own thoughts.
Sorrow feels very physical to me, so does anxiety. I have on multiple occasions passed out from one or the other. But that doesn’t happen anymore. I don’t feel like a slave, and I actually feel like my “disorders” are nothing more than reactions up on reactions to things left unsaid, feelings being suppressed to the verge of explosion, and a body being completely overwhelmed. It’s a mixture of different things, but above all it’s how I disregarded myself.
When I started being honest about how I truly felt and shared it with the people around me, the clouds slowly dissolved. I could not only see the rainbow but actually allow the rainbow to touch me and bring me joy.
The body that once felt so fragile and numb started asking for things such as nurturing foods, water and more water, comforting clothes and shoes that actually fit and didn’t hurt my feet. It wanted to exercise, to move. It wanted to be around people who felt safe and joyful. And what made it all truly change is when I realized that these were all things that I needed to do for myself, listening to my own needs and following up on what was there to be done. This was my recipe to feeling safe. Safe in my body, safe with myself and starting to feel inspired and committed to my life.
Knowing that needing support and wanting people around, is normal and even necessary.
My anxiety wasn’t a huge mountain I needed to climb by myself in order to be good enough for people to want me. I was actually lovable all along, by just being me. The true me, the me that was hiding behind a mask worn to fill the expectation that was never there to begin with.
In this process I lost a lot of friends, but in the end, I realized that this was never an actual loss, but just a way to clear the path for real and true relationships to emerge. Relationships where I could be the whole and true me.
By clearing the path, space was made for me to be me without a mask.
